Christmas Quake
Should've mentioned this already, Christmas Quake: Operation Santa Slay has been released
by Black Omega. Here's the lowdown from their
page:

Xmas Quake is the first ever production by our
newly formed group, Black Omega. Xmas Quake includes new skins, sounds, and two new levels
for Quake all with a nice xmas theme. It includes a 12m 45s movie detailing the adventures
of two quake heros battling against the evil Shambler Claus. The real Santa Claus has been
kidnaped and his workshops and factorys have been invaded. This amazing movie is recorded
from a continuously moving floating camera perspective for some stunning views and
perspectives :) .

Prey Screenshots
There are a couple of new Prey screenshots over on PreyStation. On the subject of Prey, Prey.Net has just opened. Also, Prey Project Leader Paul
Schuytema updated his .plan with a small state of the Prey address.

ION's John Romero updated
his .plan with a response to negative feedback he's received about his comments about
female gamers.

id's Brian "No Nickname" Hook made a
.plan update responding to complaints from the authors of QNM about the removal of the
ability to make animated, scrolling "fun names" in Quake II (which I personally
won't miss for a minute).

Rogue's Steve "Gateway" Tietze updated
his .plan with a progress report on the QE4 Manual.

Worldcraft Quake II Support
Doing this update from the offices of Valve Software gave me a unique opportunity for a
scoop. Valve has announced version 1.6 of Worldcraft, featuring full Quake II support.
Gabe Newell, Managing Director of Valve says he received hundreds of emails from
Worldcraft users eager for Q2 support within a day or two of the game's release. According
to this press release (sorry about the bad
link, it's fixed now) Worldcraft 1.6 will have support for new Quake II features like
transparency modes, radiosity settings, and the ability to export textures into a separate
.wal file. The new version is expected to be made available on the Worldcraft website before December 31, and will be a
free upgrade for registered users.

New Quake Comic
Death at DM5, the new Quake Comic by CO2 has
been released. I have unfortunately not been able to check it out, as Java seems to crash
every browser on every machine I try here at Valve.

MS & SGI Present: Fahrenheit
There is a press
release on Yahoo describing a new collaboration between Microsoft and Silicon Graphics
on a project code-named Fahrenheit, which is "...aimed at increasing graphics
capabilities for a wide variety of consumer, business and professional
customers....", and will include both Direct3D and OpenGL. Thanks RonSolo.

Newer Quake II FAQ
Version 1.1 of the Quake II FAQ has been
released. Apparently FAQ's can have bugfixes too, as I'm told the change here is a fix for
broken hyperlinks in version 1.0. Thanks Ken
"Wirehead" Wronkiewicz.

Avatar3
Avatar, on a roll with Quake releases has released Avatar3 a five map Rocket Arena pack
(Avatar1 and 2 were doom .wads, Avatar1 being an all-time favorite of mine). Available on
the Avatar3 section of Avatar's page.

Competitions
In order to create a balanced playing field, the ClanRing's T3
Tournament finals will now be a live event at the SlamSite in L.A. Also, the ClanRing
has announced plans to create a Clan
Council as part of the organization for T4, and are seeking nominations for qualified
board members. There is also a patch on the ClanRing
page that makes the speed of the rockets in Quake II the same as the original Quake.

Updated the Quake II page, among the new
items is a tutorial on Quake II .dll programming in Borland C++ and an updated tutorial
for the same using LCC. Also, BraFish, the secretmeister has completed Stomped's Quake II Secrets
page.

etc.
QSpawn, the Quake front-end, now features Quake II support.
On the QSpawn page. Thanks Prophet ... Just for fun, the Image of the day is the BlueJet (thanks deathgod):

Tuesday, December 16, 1997

Off in the BlueJet
Today is a travel day, as I fly off to the wilds of Seattle, WA, to check out what's going
on with Valve and Half-Life (also likely to dine on Pork Riblets with Wedge and Choryoth,
deathmatch, and probably end up getting my eye shot out by Wedge's automatic pellet gun).

Quake II Resources
A couple more goodies, also added (along with some other tidbits) to the Quake II tips page (which will be
updated while I'm in Seattle, but probably won't be redesigned until after I return on
Friday):

Departments
In addition to the updates to the Quake
II tips page, there are a couple of responses in the MailBag to yesterday's letter about .DLL security issues.

Quake II Mods

If you share my disappointment at not being able to hop on that big turret and fire it
yourself after killing the guy manning it in the Jail level of Quake II, you'll want
to check out the Controllable Turret patch that Ridah
has created. More information is on this
page.

It sounds like there are still a lot of kinks in it, but it is still first, I'm talking
about The Famkebot, which is
the first bot for Quake II that I've heard of.

Add "+set zombietime -1000" to the
command line of a dedicated server. This will clear out zombies after a client
disconnects. This will be fixed properly in the point release. Thanks to John Cash for
letting me know about this workaround.

Quake II Worldcraft
There's a package assembled by [BC]Casey with
everything you need to edit Quake II map using Worldcraft on The Forge.

New GameSpy Installer
A new version of the GameSpy 1.1-1.5 patch has been released on the GameSpy page. The new version simply makes sure you are
properly set up to retrieve Quake II servers. There's also word there on their "Sound
and the Fury" contest, coming to a close soon.

Monolith's Jay Shade made a
.plan update with his Quake II reactions, and welcoming the newest addition to the
Blood 2 team, Mike King who designed some of the maps in Malice (and who actually survived
a legendary Brothers Gib private LAN Party, congrats Klink!).

ION's John Romero, noted lover of game music, mentions in
his .plan that the Quake II track names are now available through the CDDB Internet
database, and pointing out a few more game anniversaries: December 14 was the seventh
birthday of Commander Keen: Invasion of the Vorticons, the first game that id Software
created and released into shareware, and yesterday was the 6th birthday of Commander Keen:
Goodbye, Galaxy!

id's Disruptor made a
.plan update asking for feedback on problems anyone is having now that he's moved id's
FTP and WWW in-house.

etc.
Apparently ION's John Romero, id's Todd Hollenshead, Quake, and Quake II all appeared on last night's edition of ABC's Nightline. Thanks Phlash24 ... Airon made this audio Quake II commercial (462 KB) in .mp3
format as an assignment for a class (I love game-related
homework) ... .DM2 is open for
business, a repository for Quake II demos if you want to send yours in ... Thanks Dark Wind for the Santa
Hat logo, and a related note about the wreath
"Q" that I failed to mention yesterday
is that the original was made last year by Rocketbait
...

New BSP
Version .88b of the BSP Quake/Quake II level editor has been released on the BSP Headquarters. Thanks Mangler.

Mini-Leak in the GL
Miniport
Jack "morbid" Mathews updated
his .plan with word on a memory leak in the 3Dfx GL minidriver that he's addressing,
since it has become a problem for some Quake II users (in the complete update he also
discusses GameSpy):

Yeah, there's a bug in the miniport
that shipped with Q2. Actually, this bug has always been part of the miniport, it's a
memory leak. Sort of. See, we don't deallocate memory when the miniport unloads.
Normally, this is not a problem, because Windows cleans up that memory just fine. However,
Windows only does that when an EXE unloads. Since Q2 can dynamically load the DLL, every
time a vid_restart happens, bam, big ass leak until you quit. I didn't expect people to
run into this very often, but I guess there are people that are vid_restart-happy, so I
fixed this. I want to look over some other stuff in the miniport, maybe run it through
VTune or something. I'll package it up in a nice pretty installer for everyone and it'll
be put on the 3Dfx website, Blue's, Redwood's, and all that good stuff.

New QuArK
Version 4.06 of QuArK has been released on the QuArK
page, featuring limited Quake II support.

New All-Star CTF
(Updated)
Version 1.0 of All-Star CTF has been released on the All-Star CTF page. Here
is the full client (15.5 MB), the server (4.4 MB), and the client upgrade (3.2 MB) if you already
have version 0.91. Also now available is Xeno
CTF 1.0 (7.8 MB). Thanks Tungsten[CNN]
Supreme Dictator for Life of Clan CNN for sending
along word of a mirror on their Files Page
(where I got them). I got a lot of responses to my comments about cdrom.com's slowness,
none of them disagreeing. I wonder what happened there? Thanks also to Frans P. de Vries, who, wearing his hat as Doom/Quake
archive backup maintainer at cdrom.com, points out that mirrors are also available, like this one
maintained by Gamers.Org, which is up to date (he
also taught me the correct way to write cdrom.com, without the hyphen).

Quake II DM6 (Updated)Dakota sent along a map made by Tattoo that is
(w00w00) a Quake II remake of DM6 (249 KB).
This is a twice updated version of the one posted earlier that swaps a hyper-blaster for
the rail-gun and fixes the spawn points.

Quake II (QE4) Editing
Guide
Zoid has written a Quick HowTo for
QuakeEd4, complete with screenshots to help get you started with id's Quake II editor.
Rogue's Gateway is still working on the documentation, and, according to his
.plan, is looking for a website where users can post their questions (email him if
you're interested).

Brian Hook has released information on a bug in
Quake 2 with the GL_EXT_SWAPINTERVAL handling. So what this means is, if you have this
setting:
"SET FX_GLIDE_SWAPINTERVAL=0" IN YOUR AUTOEXEC.BAT on your "C" Drive,
Quake 2 will change it to "1" under certain situations when the game loads.
After Quake 2 changes it to "1" you will lose about 20% in FPS...

The way to overcome this is to put the SET
FX_GLIDE_SWAPINTERVAL=0 in a Quake2 batch file. And start the game with the quake2 batch
file. Doing it this way loads the setting when you start the game.

Sweden defeated the USA in an International CTF match this weekend, demos and accounts
of the action can be found here (Sweden) and here (USA). Thanks Methabol. This was apparently an epic battle
that after four matches and 2000 frags, left the teams separated by a mere four frags at
the end!

Tim Cook of TeamGamespy updated
his .plan with a couple of simple things you should know if you are having trouble
getting Quake II support working properly in GameSpy 1.5.

Brian Hook made a pair of .plan updates (both can be found there) following up on his
huge benchmark posting by elaborating on a few of the cards tested, giving a definition of
SLI, which he follows up with an explanation (excerpted below) of why it's possible SLI
will not be changing anyone's life when it comes to Quake II performance:

- currently there is a throughput problem with
the Voodoo2. Well, it's not really a "problem", it's more like a bottleneck at
around 67fps, which is very hard to classify as a "problem". This means that
having a Voodoo2 in an SLI configuration doesn't make much sense unless you want to run
fast high resolution modes like 800x600. Currently there is no significant difference in
performance between an SLI and non-SLI Voodoo2 configuration when runnning at 640x480 or lower. HOWEVER, if it turns out that
they're artificially limited in throughput (poor drivers, early silicon, low-speed parts,
whatever) then there is a chance that the SLI will make a difference -- although I have no
idea why you'd need to run > 60fps.

Competition
The QuakeWorld High-Ping Capture League
(QWHPCL), one of the most successful leagues going, is changing its name to
"Ender's Game" for next season, and has announced the Great Eight in the
playoffs.

Quake II 3D Benchmarks
Brian Hook made a massive .plan update giving detailed benchmarks and
descriptions of Quake II's performance on the gamut of available 3D accelerators. All the
top performers are, probably unsurprisingly, different flavors of 3Dfx's upcoming Voodoo
2. Here's what Brian had to say about that:

Every now and then a beast walks the landscape
and devours all within its path, knowing no natural enemy. These are the things of legend:
Michael Jordan, Walter Payton, the great white shark, early Mike Tyson, and...

3DFX, ca. 1997

He forgot Lawrence Taylor, but the point is well taken.

QView 5.0 Beta (Quake II Support)Version 5.0 of QView (132 KB), a
free alternative to GameSpy, includes Quake II
support, and is now in public beta, available on the QHost/QView Homepage. QHost, which allows
remote configuration of game servers for Quake, QuakeWorld and Hexen II does not yet work
with Quake II.

Quake II Proxy Updated
The Quake II Proxy on Crystal
Services QuakeQuakeWorld Servers page has been updated with some enhancements: support
for multiple clients using same proxy; the ability to specify proxy port independently of
the server port; the ability to specify the proxy IP on the command line (this will now
let the proxy work for a lot more people); and connection/disconnection info on clients.

Quake II Mod Security
On the subject of Quake II DLL security, mentioned here yesterday, comes a reminder of the
core focus of OpenQuake (who are also offering
web space to host modification pages), to provide a verification service for Mod authors.
Here's a summary of the process:

Essentially, mod authors would release their
source to OpenQuake (after signing an electronic nondisclosure agreement preventing OQ
from distributing the source) and then the highly qualified OpenQuake board would review
the source for "malicious content." Mods that passed the verification process
would be given a "Stamp of Approval" indicating their status as a safe mod, as
well as a CRC checksum to verify the originality of approved mods. (To prevent post
verification meddling.) Finally, mods that passed the verification process would also be
actively promoted on the OpenQuake web site and on OpenQuake affiliated sites.

Many mod authors are coming to OpenQuake with
questions about the process, and so far the reactions are very positive. OpenQuake also is
undertaking a Quake2 documentation project, the goal of which is to provide the highly
comprehensive information the game*.dll code structure.

Quake II Fraglogs
A mod that allows you to log the frags on a Quake II server, including source, has been
released on the Quake 2
frag logging page.

Midi in Quake II
Brandon Reinhart, of the aforementioned OpenQuake
Organization, has created a mod that allows you to play midi tunes inside of Quake II,
available on the Q2MidiMod page.

Quake II Worldcraft?Multiplayer Quake (MPQ), has word that
Taskmaster has figured out how to edit Quake II maps using Worldcraft, and has posted some
files and instructions to help.

etc.
Wow, not one but two emails (thanks /<abuKi
and FRAGaLOT) on the same day reminding me it was
time to put up Sujoy's Christmas wreath (update: thanks to Medic who sent along an animated one to replace the
one I lost, and to Snoopy who sent one as well) ...

Saturday, December 13, 1997

Quake II Model Info
Disruptor has uploaded a file (145 KB)
with the information required to create new models for Quake II to id's FTP site. Here is the note from his
.plan update:

I uploaded some files to help you all get
started with creating player models. You can view them in TexPaint (which John released
the source for yesterday), and if you have a 24bit GL card, you can even use TexPaint to
paint on the models.

I've included the base.tri from each the male
and player model along with one LBM to get you started with, as well as one of their
crouching and standing frames.

I was also going to upload the conversion
utility I hacked together that we used to convert maps from Quake I to Quake II format,
but after giving it futher thought, it was really a moot point. QE4 can read in Quake I
maps, and you are going to need to retexutre all your maps anyway (My program didn't
handle that as all our QI format maps already contained Q2 texture names). The program
didn't handle converting entities from one type to another because we didn't need that
functionality (again, everything in the QI format maps were already using the new Q2
entities.)

Also, thanks Radar for sending along a relevant
quote from the read me about TexPaint and player models:

You can use TexPaint as a model viewer, but if
you wish to use TexPaint to paint on a model, you will need a GL card which supports 24
bit textures, and a 24 bit framebuffer. Otherwise if you click to paint on a model, the
pixels will show up in random places.

Quake II Forums

ELM (originators of Cenotaph of the Magi & Desparity) have started a series of moderated Quake II forums devoted to editing and
modification discussions.

Quake II Mods Already
A couple of Quake II modifications are out already: Capture the Gib is described as a cross between
CTF and HeadHunters. Here's the homepage
of a simple mod to change the obituary messages in Quake II. I've also been sent a
few, but since their effect on the game is trivial, and there are risks associated with
DLL's, I am not posting them. I'm not sure what to say about security issues with DLL's at
this early stage in the game, other than for now, use them at your own risk. jaw3D creator
Jawed Karim sent along a DLL that make your
PC speaker beep upon each kill, a simple demonstration that a DLL can contain code that
can extend beyond the game and harm your computer, and an example of why you should
proceed with caution. On this subject, Inside3D has
posted their first Quake II
programming tutorial, on creating missiles that split in two after being fired, and
there are four basic programming tutorials on this page by SumFuka.

Unreal: Hands on Report & New
Monster Profile

Stonage has posted a report on UnrealNation talking about his experiences of
playing Unreal, using UnrealEd, and other miscellaneous stuff during his two day visit to
Digital Extremes in early November. Thanks Prophet.

Unreal.Com has posted a cool looking
profile of The Mercenary, one of the foes that will be found in the Unreal world. There is
also an accompanying animated gif "surveillance video" (that runs at 100 FPS on
my machine, suggesting the mercenary should lay off the caffeine). Thanks Prophet.

Quake Art49 new pieces of art have been added to Braindead's Quake Art. Thanks Prophet. Also, [CO2], dedicated to Quake
art as well, has relocated, and can now be found at www.planetquake.com/co2/. The word on
Braindead's page is that [CO2]'s upcoming Quake cartoon may be released before the
scheduled date of next Friday.

New CTF+
CTF Plus Version 2.0 has been released on the CTF
Plus page. This new version allows you see which weapon a player is carrying, and adds
a menu-driven competition mode, tossed powerups, and more.

New Qoole with Quake II Support
Version 2.3 beta 4 of WinQoole and GLQoole, each featuring preliminary support for editing
Quake II maps, have been released on the Qoole site.
Thanks TAiNiUM.

Interview
Ex-id biz guy, and now ex-ION Storm CEO, Mike Wilson, talks to GameSpot in an interview about
his new endeavor g.o.d. (Gathering of Developers). Thanks CiDcO
of the new Daikatana Bushido.

.plans

Paul Steed made a
.plan update indicating that a true color hi-rez version of the into will come
eventually (no time frame yet), and also pointing out that the intro should not be watched
in GL, you should switch to software for the intro and back to GL to play the game.

Prey Producer Paul Schuytema posted his Quake II reactions in
his .plan (sounds like he need to update his Glide drivers).

Monolith's Craig Hubbard also mentions Quake II in
his .plan, saying it is "Definitely the culmination of the genre."

The story of Ritual's Charlie Wiederhold's go at a 100+ player deathmatch map seems to
have ended, as his
latest .plan update indicates he's relented and split it into two smaller maps.

Brian Hook updated his .plan about the new machine he got so he can get back down
to benchmarks.